Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to, for example, an image forming apparatus for displaying various types of information on a browser screen, an information display method, and a computer-readable recording medium storing a program.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in an image forming apparatus such as MFP (Multi Function Peripherals), an operation screen (for example, a maintenance tool) is displayed on an operation display portion by the browser. The browser is for displaying, for example, an html page including html (Hyper Text Markup Language) contents, and is displayed generally on a display device of a client terminal. The client terminal can transmit an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) request to a server through a communication line and display data received from the server on the browser screen. In the image forming apparatus, a portion corresponding to the client terminal is a browser portion for controlling the browser, and a portion corresponding to the server is a server processing portion provided in the image forming apparatus. A predetermined memory region is assigned in the server processing portion, and information can be held in the memory region.
The HTTP request to be transmitted by the client terminal to the server is constituted of a request line, a header portion, and a body portion, and a GET method or a POST method is used.
The GET method is for transmitting the HTTP request to the server by adding information (data, parameters and the like) to a character string after a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) included in the request line. The number of characters in the URL that can be transmitted by the GET method has limitation. In addition, the client terminal can transmit text data to the server by using the GET method, but cannot transmit binary data.
The POST method is for transmitting the HTTP request to the server by describing information in the body portion. The POST method is capable of transmitting both text data and binary data. The client terminal can receive data to be displayed on a subsequent html page together with the subsequent html page from the server by using the POST method when making a request to the server for displaying the subsequent html page of the server from the html page currently displayed.
Technologies for displaying such html contents on the browser screen include the one disclosed in, for example, Patent Literature 1. Patent Literature 1 discloses the technology of storing, under an arbitrary name at an arbitrary place, an HTML file corresponding to contents displayed on a screen region (first frame) occupying a considerable portion of the screen by a file storing function of the browser.